Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.
This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.
Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?
#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse
It’s not an issue. As long as .social is able to maintain the load.
The good thing about decentralization is that at any moment anyone could open a new instance and it would work perfectly fine. It does not matter if one instance have more or less users.
If it lowers the entry barrier it is welcome. It should not matter at all.
It is an issue if .social ever decides to “Be evil”, and utilized their outsized influence over the rest of the 'verse.
Edit: The concept is known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
The thing about the fediverse is that it’s incredibly easy to make an instance and they are all compatible. So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.
It’s not like twitter where if the owner become evil there’s nothing to do. Here you just move instance and be done with it, still the same platform, still the same users.
This is not a given. Anyone can fork the protocol. If they are a large enough instance, they can include evil features in their fork, and block any instance that doesn’t use that fork. The users of competing forks then don’t have access, and their users move to a cooperating instance.
It has happened before; It will happen again.
Or even change protocols. Mastodon used to use OStatus before it changed to ActivityPub. And some platforms are multi-protocol, like Hubzilla and Friendica. Whether they are compatible depends on which protocols they have turned on.
When have that happened? Within the fediverse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Threads tried and failed to do that with mastodon. I think the fediverse is well thought to prevent that even by big actors.
!remindme 10 years